News

China bets billions on the future: canals

WITH red banners flying and patriotic music in their ears, Chinese engineers have just completed a critical section of the biggest water project in the country’s history that will irrigate the arid northern plains and bring water to Beijing for the 2008 Olympics.

Not content with laying a railway across the snowcapped Tibetan plateau — the first train departed yesterday — or taming the floodwaters of the Yangtze with the Three Gorges dam, the Communist party now aims, quite literally, to turn the tide of Chinese history.

The “south-north canals” plan is the party’s greatest infrastructure undertaking and will take half a century to complete.

Gigantic tunnels will carry water beneath the course of the Yellow River, mega-dams will be constructed in the remote mountains of the west and a new canal system will run along the Grand canal waterway, constructed by slaves 2,500 years ago.